UNWETTER is an international group of artists, curators, activists and theoreticians.

THE SPACE/COLLECTIVE

Like Unwetter (German for stormy and turbulent weather) radical global transformations reshuffle conventional knowledge systems and hierarchies, opening new spaces to be explored.

UNWETTER's basic format is the Discursive Picnic that connects different contexts in an ongoing process of reciprocal exchange. The Discursive Picnic is an improvised event, ready to be modified and changed. Time and place are announced for the public to join. It works as a potluck, where everybody is both guest and host at the same time. In the UNWETTER thermos-box, "where ideas are kept cool", theory and practice fall together. We find, collect, exchange, alter, pack up and move on.

Arriving at a site, we unpack and array within flexible elements, blankets, picnic furniture also tents - when necessary. Our aim is to open up a situation for both spontaneously and thoroughly elaborated contributions, where visitors, guests, we ourselves or the public, become actors, listeners, performers, hosts or audience, in ever changing roles, departing into new directions by tours, associations, diversions, walks etc. (Christine Wolfe, Jole Wilcke, Ulrike Solbrig, Clemens Krauss, Benno Gammerl, Dorothee Albrecht)

Discursive Picnic_Action Weaving
30 August 2009, 2 pm at Montbijoupark, Berlin with Suwan Laimanee from Chiang Mai, Thailand, Kirsten Dufour from Copenhagen and Travis Meinolf, action weaver from San Francisco.

You/we are invited – Everybody is both guest and host at the same time – take/bring ideas, drinks/food, blankets, bring yourself – be there to share and exchange weave, massage, listen and talk.

Travis Meinolf: "For Sozial Fabrik: One-Day Atelier in the Park please help me to create an edition of hand-woven cloth sculptures in Monbijoupark! I will demonstrate how to use my small looms to quickly produce cloth. I will show you how to tie your loom to a tree and make fabric, and afterwards you can keep the loom that you have learned how to use at the event.

I will also be available to teach people individually any time before the event, at my workshop, 63 pflügerstrasse near liberdastrasse/reuterstrasse.

Materials will be provided. If you have extra yarn to donate to the project, please bring some!

Visit http://www.actionweaver.com for more information about my relational weaving practice. Hope to see you there, Travis"

In her article, Walls Fall Down: Berlin's Contemporary Art Institutions, the Berlin based curator and writer, Astrid Mania, states: "Among the many Berlin-based initiatives offering space for debate and reflection on contemporary art and its institutions, UNWETTER is perhaps the most changeable and unpredictable, functioning without a permanent space or platform as an umbrella organization for relatively unstructured, open art events....read more